Millennials Rising | an alternate view

In view of what folks are saying about our millennial brothers and sisters (and daughters and sons and friends and colleagues), here's a little piece called, Millennials Rising. Enjoy + propagate.

The music comes courtesy of The Wired CD_Rip. Sample. Mash. Share. The remarkable Kate Jaeger provided the voice talent.

the soup they're in | a small idea from Raising Adults

They didn’t plan it; it just happened.

Like other extraordinary generations, their parents didn’t know what to do with them—anybody could see it in their reaction to pompadours, t-shirts and jeans, rock & roll and “race music.” The kids sure felt it. That was obvious from the Saturday night cruising cultures—kids burning cheap gas in fast cars for no other reason than to be out, meaning not home. They embraced heroes like James Dean and Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Richie Valens, then Beat writers like Ginsberg and Burroughs. 

“Edgar Rice Burroughs?” their fathers would ask; “the Tarzan guy?” 

“No, Dad: William Burroughs; the Naked Lunch guy. Gad! You are so square.”

And yes these were also the hippie kids who hung out in parks, smoking dope and pitching Frisbee Brand Flying Disks.

They were the leading edge of a wave of rising crime, juvenile pregnancy and suicide. A wave the rest of us followed and follow still. I think it may have been the Frisbees.

Against that backdrop, perhaps most trivial of all these indicators was the decline in scholastic achievement and test scores. 

Compared to a growing prison population (not to mention the growing number of crime victims); compared to growing teenage pregnancy rates (not to mention the cost to single mothers and their children and the numbing effect on prodigal fathers of sex for sex’s sake); compared to the tragic loss of life—the suicidal abandonment of hope by more Americans than we had ever witnessed—lower test scores hardly seem worth mentioning. 

But school achievement is concrete; it seems like a problem we might be able to do something about. So, of course we would mention it. Of course we would fixate on what-to-do-about-those-darn-schools.

Big Basic Question: Does it make sense to explain the decline in achievement and the rise in public health problems to things that occurred when the class of ‘63 were seniors (namely, the Supreme Court decision on school-sponsored prayer)?

Big Basic Question Answered: I think students in the Class of ‘63 were shaped by the 17 years it took them to arrive in their senior year. How could it be otherwise? 

The class of ‘40 grew up in the adversity of the 1930s, graduated, and went off to fight the war. They had no control over the circumstances of their lives—they were children. For better and worse their Depression-era upbringing shaped them. 

That was their cultural soup. Five years later, when they conceived the first wave of a new generation, how could those children not be shaped by the 50s?

Come to think of it, how could our kids not carry the distinct flavors of the soup they’re in? 

— from Raising Adults

what's up with the class of '63 | a small idea from Raising Adults

Fast-Forward a dozen years. It is 1963. The Civil Rights movement is in full swing. The Supreme Court rules on school-sponsored prayer. We are unaware that President Kennedy is nearing the end of his rope even as he launches the United States into the Space Race and threatens to heat up the Cold War. School children practice duck and cover routines while construction companies do big business on Fallout Shelters.

And for the first time anyone can remember, school achievement declines. The Class of ‘63 doesn’t score as well as the class before them. In suicide, pregnancy and crime rates, they do even worse. 

A year passes. John F. Kennedy is dead. The Civil Rights Act is law. The British mount a Prime Time invasion of North America (pushing west out of Liverpool, the Beatles take New York in a single day). The Class of ‘64 achieves less than the Class of ‘63. 

A year passes. We learn that U.S. military advisors are on the ground someplace called Vietnam. Things get out of hand at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Class of ’65 achieves less than the Class of ‘64.

And so it goes year after year; America’s children achieving less than their grandparents in the boom at the turn of the last century, less than their own parents in the depths of the Great Depression. What gives?

One theory ties the decline in achievement and increased rates of juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy and suicide, to the Supreme Court decision banning compulsory, school-sponsored prayer. An interesting notion.

will this be on the test? | a small idea from Raising Adults

[The tidal wave of 1st graders that somehow took US schools by surprise in 1951] was a moment of crisis in education. It became a quandary in child-rearing because the response to this flood of students seems to have been Make More Desks, Build Larger Class Rooms. Just like that, from sea to shining sea, too many students and too few teachers, became the norm.

You already know what happened, but here it is again for the record. For the first time, in a nation committed to universal education, classroom focus shifted from what students learned to what teachers taught.

Teachers who previously gave personal attention to each student throughout the day, now spent a large part of their energy on crowd control.

Students, whose older siblings had time to engage their teachers and fellow students in meaningful discussion, became note-takers. The most successful pupils learned to discern which points in the teachers’ lectures were important.

Today I am announcing a nationwide search for the individual who first voiced that immortal question:

Will this be on the test?

He or she will be enshrined. Or possibly shunned.

Overnight, monologue replaced dialogue. The school day, which, a year before, included personal attention for every student, now consisted of as much lecture as the children could stand, followed by work sheets, list-making, and rote memory, followed by more lecture.

Writing was gradually replaced by multiple choice testing—years later my Earth Science teacher liked to call it multiple guess. Multiple choice tests could be administered smoothly and graded quickly. Eventually, the tests were standardized nationwide.

Class room discussion, such as it was, tended to be dominated by a few students at the front of the room. The unskilled, the uncertain and the shy hid out in the back of the room or, worse, were hidden by the bodies in front of them.

— from Raising Adults

television | a small idea from Raising Adults

Television

As the 40s ended, young Americans were sucked into a vortex of change that made their heads spin. Geographical and social displacement; a gender crisis almost nobody talked about; babies everywhere; exploding college enrollment; a religious revival on the West Coast; labor disputes in the cities; globalization and a heavy tax burden driven by the Marshall Plan’s massive foreign aid; high-tech innovation; economic growth and work, work, work! 

Good Golly Miss Molly those people could work! They threw themselves into the race, steering the engines of war down an economic fast track unmatched on earth. And they relished the fruit of their labors, forsaking their waste-not-want-not past with giddy pleasure. In the 30s, their parents gathered ’round the radio to hear promises of a chicken in every pot and hope for a better day. But these new parents worked overtime to put two cars in the driveway, four pots on the electric range and a television in the living room.

Television—wonder of wonders! It was the Saturday Matinee—minus the Milk Duds but with all the comforts of home. Even in the beginning, when the square screens displayed test patterns much of the day, television delivered access to sights and sounds most human beings never expected to see in their own homes. Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody for the kiddies. Live comedy on Your Show of Shows. Broadway and Hollywood actors on Playhouse 90. And perhaps most wondrous of all, the news.

the same boat | a small idea from Raising Adults

The same boat

If Boomers like me gave up our ideals in The Big Chill, well our kids may be sorry for us but, frankly, it has nothing to do with them. They don’t hate us for that, they don’t hold us in contempt. But they don’t admire us either, or feel obliged to listen when we go on about things (as we tend to do). Still, they’re watching. For what, we’re not sure. They play by a different set of rules and they won’t necessarily tell us what they are.

Most kids seem to be doing fine. They’re not in jail nor do they seem likely to go there. They get to school or work most days. They don’t carry concealed weapons, traffic in drugs or consort with prostitutes. They seem to be turning out OK.

Perhaps it’s benign neglect: We managed to not screw them up. Or Providence. Providence was very popular with the founding fathers and mothers. It’s in all the early writings; I see no reason we can’t invoke it now.

Or maybe we didn’t do such a bad job on the whole. Maybe the kids are alright. Except that some aren’t doing so well; some days it seems like most aren’t doing so well.

Generation X and Y and whatever’s next are clichés constructed on something observable. That observable something is a disturbing level of aimlessness, sadness, anger, fear, occasional violence, and hopelessness.

Many of our children reach adulthood with a serious deficit of life skills. They enter their adult years emotionally impotent, unable to cope with pressure, socially unskilled, scholastically under-prepared, spiritually undernourished.

I wish I could say these problems belong to someone else. I wish I could say they are urban issues. I’d like to point to out-of-touch rural communities and say, Look, these folk aren’t raising adults. I wish these were the challenges of single mothers, people of color, the poor. It would give me great satisfaction to say these difficulties afflict only the rich. But it’s not true. We’re all in the same boat.

— from Raising Adults